The Consequence of Intentions
by miseenplace
Summary: Hermione Granger promised herself that after the war, she would find purpose and do good. Draco Malfoy made a different promise—one to revitalize the Malfoy name. When their paths cross, they realize that they'll both have to change their plans in order to get what they want.


The Wizarding world was, for lack of a better word, restless. There was an unsettling, on-edge disturbance to the London streets, even if the Muggles that halted at every stop sign and woke at every sunrise didn't notice it. It was the kind of inability to trust even the smallest of things that created a sense of permanency to each and every wizard's quiet anxiety—no one was ready to believe that their Gringotts teller wasn't under the Imperius curse, that their front door wouldn't burst open in the middle of dinner with a flash of staggering green light. The magical world had grown—understandably so—_paranoid_.

But there had been no Dark Marks smeared across ugly green skies, no emblazoned _Daily Prophet_ headlines about how many people had died in the past twenty-four hours, no scuttling whispers at the Ministry about who was betraying who. It had been exactly one year since the end of the war, and the reality of their everyday lives was, as unlikely as it was to be believed, _ordinary_.

And Hermione Granger could appreciate the ordinary. Her parents were _dentists. _She knew how to embrace the beauty of a well-followed schedule, the hum of a seemingly mundane conversation. Routines meant establishing a system, and having a system meant being able to make real progress.

Progress took the always-challenging form of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, where Hermione found herself continuously butting heads with traditional witches and wizards who wouldn't budge on outdated laws that shackled—metaphorically, but even so—house-elves, dragons, giants, and countless other magical creatures to the bottom of the societal food chain.

Today was no different, she thought to herself as she clambered into the Ministry lift, bracing herself for the infamous lurching that never agreed with her stomach. The lift was relatively empty today, save for Stamford Jorkins and another witch she did not recognize, looking mightily out of place with her wildly neon glasses and brassy curls. She vaguely reminded Hermione of Rita Skeeter, except with a much friendlier face and less bile bubbling out her throat.

"Granger," Jorkins greeted her briskly, business-like and no-nonsense. "This is Madame Cresswell. Madame, Hermione Granger. Madame Cresswell was Dirk's second cousin and recently moved in from Ireland to take on a job in the Goblin Liaison Office," he said pointedly, his introductions painfully official.

"Runs in the family, apparently," Cresswell said with a heavy and obvious Irish accent. "Couldn't stay away when Jorkins here owled me. The London goblins makes the Irish ones look like butterflies."

Hermione smiled politely but Jorkins didn't so much as crack a lighthearted grin. "Miss Granger works in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. One of our prime legislators in that office."

"Pleasure," Cresswell said, flattening her unruly bangs and beaming. "I've heard all about you, of course."

Hermione stiffened at this, as she was still mildly uncomfortable with the extra attention after Voldemort's fall. Of course, she had had her fair share during her Hogwarts years, roped into _Prophet_ articles as Harry's lackey or girlfriend or whatever other foolishness was printed that week. But ever since the war ended, she had been getting stares. Whispers. _This must have been what Harry had to deal with all his life, _she constantly thought desperately to herself.

As the older with and wizard dipped out of the lift at their floor, bidding Hermione goodbye, she wondered to herself about the onslaught of new Ministry employees. Each department seemed to be bringing in a handful of new individuals, and the hiring process seemed to be rushed all across the board. It was ideal, of course, for new graduates who were looking to become Aurors or Healers, occupations that would have been markedly more difficult to pursue if the Ministry didn't seem to be _vacuuming_ new recruits into its offices.

She supposed it was a good thing, Hermione mused as she got off on her floor and walked quickly to her office, since most of her time in office was spent trying to convince her higher-ups that the new legislation she was pushing was a good idea or squabbling with the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes over whether or not giving house-elves more freedom would create problems with exposing them to the Muggle world.

"Mornin' Granger," Cuthbert Mockridge, one of the oldest employees in their department and technically Hermione's boss, grunted as she walked into the joint office space. He was poring over a stack of files, no doubt paperwork with Wizengamot that is more likely than not giving him a right headache. She would bet five galleons that it was the backlog from her house-elf legislation proposals. She knows she's been a thorn in Mockridge's side from the moment she started working in the department, but it bolsters her confidence to know that she gets the most done, despite upsetting the most conservative members of both Wizengamot and this office.

"Morning," she said cheerfully, taking a seat at her desk, which was two away from Mockridge's and adjacent to Erwin Armistead, the only employee younger than her in the office. Armistead was a brash, noisome young man fresh out of Hogwarts with burns and scars littering his face and body like color-coded labels.

"This one's from our trip to Burkina Faso," he'd tell anyone who'd listen, jabbing a finger at a particularly discolored scar. "Dad always took us to reserves whenever he had to travel for the Ministry. I tell ya, the number of runespoors out there will scare the robes off ya—teeth like nothing you ever seen before."

Unsurprisingly, Armistead walked into the office ten minutes after Hermione, barely on time for the start of his shift. He had an armful of what looked like flashy flyers in tow, and his clear sense of excitement seemed to enter the room before he did.

"You'll never believe what we just received," Armistead said, nearly bouncing his way to his desk. He dropped the stack of flyers and pressed a finger to it.

"What is it?" Hermione asked with interest, while Mockridge ignored the situation entirely, quill scratching furiously against his parchment.

"'The first annual _Wizards Against Creature Cruelty_ charity gala will be held June 27'," Armistead recited off the flyer. "'All proceeds will go to the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Formal attire, 6PM, _Malfoy Manor_.'"

"You're _joking_," Hermione blurted immediately. "When did we approve a charity fund? When did we approve a gala run by the Malfoys?"

"Three weeks ago," Mockridge grunted from his desk, and both Hermione and Armistead jerked to face him.

"_What_?"

"Three weeks ago," he repeated. "We received the paperwork to approve the charity and its proceeds. Malfoy proposed a handful of different uses for the money in our department, and it was approved three weeks ago."

"How come no one told any of us?" Hermione asked, appalled. She almost always got to comb through the philanthropic side of matters in their office, as it was what interested her most about their work besides drafting new legislation.

Although in all honesty, the thing that should have surprised her most wasn't that Mockridge had been handling documents and files on his own without consulting two "young'uns"—as he not so affectionately called them—but rather that the Malfoys were holding a charity gala to combat creature cruelty.

"Hang on, how come I've never heard of this charity before?" Armistead asked, looking bewildered as he stared down their boss.

"Malfoy started it."

"_Which_ Malfoy?"

Hermione had a hard time believing that Lucius and Narcissa, who had barely left the Manor since the end of the war—out of shame, if Hermione had to hazard a guess—were venturing out into the world of philanthropy. They had mostly kept to themselves in the past year or so, not that the Wizarding community had ostracized them completely—word spread rather quickly about how Narcissa had indirectly saved Harry's life, although variations of that story included a well-painted scene where Narcissa conjured a protective golden snake that rose up into the air and prevented Voldemort from killing him right then and there, while others cited her saving him by accident, mistaking him for Draco in the fray.

But she had an even harder time believing that Draco Malfoy would be the one behind a charity gala either. He had spent the year nearly as isolated and withdrawn as his parents, no doubt hiding in the shadows of its marble walls. Hermione had heard through varied gossip that he could sometimes be found in Diagon Alley stocking up on Apothecary ingredients and liquor, head down and eyes narrow, but besides the occasional bottle of hellebore syrup or crystal filled with firewhiskey, Draco Malfoy seemed to have been making himself scarce.

And a charity gala with hundreds of copies of flyers distributed to the Ministry would hardly count as surreptitious.

"Draco Malfoy," Mockridge confirmed, shrugging nonchalantly. "He registered the charity with the Ministry a few months ago."

Hermione stared, unable to process this information, as Armistead cackled gleefully in the background, going off about something that sounded suspiciously like "_This'll be good_."

"That's ridiculous, Malfoy doesn't care about—" Hermione stopped short, realizing instantly the foolishness of her retort.

Of _course_ Malfoy didn't care about preventing the cruelty against magical creatures. Of _course_ he had started a charity under the Malfoy name a year after the war had ended. Draco Malfoy may have been a coward, but he was no fool. Hermione knew immediately that this was nothing more than a reputation game. A way to play clean-up after years of messy two-facing.

"We're going," Mockridge grunted from his desk, still not looking up at either her or Armistead. "Public appearance, accept the donation. We're using the money to fund some of our most expensive projects."

"Some of our most expensive- you can't mean my House-elf Rights Initiative?"

The H.E.R.I., which Mockridge had insisted upon instead of her Hogwarts-based project _S.P.E.W._, was a three month work-in-progress that Hermione had been doing research for, deep into the bleary nights when everyone else at the Ministry seemed to have left already. She was rounding up the last of her research and proposals at this point, and was working in between dragon legislation paperwork and nasty Dementor cases to plan out the first phase of the H.E.R.I. It would involve lobbying countless Ministry officials and creating campaigns that would be entirely non-Ministry funded to expose the Wizarding world to it.

"Yes, among others."

Armistead cleared his throat. "Sir, do you think this gala will be... successful?"

"Any effort to raise money and awareness for our department will be considered a success," he responded simply, an answer which Armistead clearly wasn't looking for.

And with that, Mockridge returned to his work, pointedly ignoring Armistead's still-open mouth, signaling the end of the conversation and a return to the mountains of paperwork they still had to attend to.

Hermione looked down at her parchment, which she was supposed to be editing, and frowned. Her project needed money, and lots of it, but she felt a little nauseous thinking about the prospect of all their funds coming from a disingenuous plan to polish the Malfoy name.

* * *

Draco Malfoy had very little patience for blunders with no explanation, laziness with no progress—which was why he was about to lose his mind in his frustration over the family's long-time caterer, an old witch from Aylesbury who had been working for the Malfoys for decades, _yet still didn't have the good sense to owl over her plans for the gala_.

Fuming, he stalked into the reading room of the Manor, snatching a quill from the mother of pearl stand on the desk and scrawling an angry note on a piece of parchment paper.

"C'mere," he grunted at Rook, the family's screech owl who remained in the reading room at all hours of the day. Draco fastened the rolled-up parchment to Rook's claws. "Agatha in Aylsebury."

Rook let out a loud hoot in confirmation and flapped his wings as Draco opened the window for him to leave. With a mighty thrust from his perch, the owl barreled out of the window and into the open sky._  
_

"Lousy... irresponsible..."

Draco was not in the mood for missteps today. He had planned the next few days out to a tee, and though his parents may have long since given up on improving the family name, he was not going to let a dead man and his forgotten Death Eaters drag the Malfoy name through the mud.

It shocked him, right after the war, when Lucius—ambitious and always assertive—seemed to crumple inwards and leave nothing more than a wisp of noxious smoke in the London air. His father—who had always rubbed elbows with the other school Governors, held the Minister in the palm of his hand, inspired fear wherever he went—had unceremoniously..._faded_.

In private, his mother had told him that without the Dark Lord's guidance and vision, Lucius felt lost. Disoriented.

"For years, upholding the Malfoy name was about being a force to be reckoned with in society, yet among the highest ranks of the Dark Lord," Narcissa had said quietly to him as they ate dinner together one night while his father had gone out to buy new robes. "Now that he- now that things have changed, what with our association with the Death Eaters written across every memo, letter, and book across England, how else is he supposed to go on?"

"I dunno, maybe work to make our name respectable again?" Draco had said vehemently, though he had heard the desperation in his own voice as he did so. He didn't know as much about the Ministry nor his father's influence in the Wizarding world, but he did know that there were steps to be taken, bridges to be mended...

"It's not that easy, Draco," his mother had said gently, looking very tired indeed. "At the end of a war, the losing side is scrutinized, and we were at the forefront of that side. People will see us as part of the enemy forever."

Draco had fallen silent at those words, but he had not abandoned his prerogative—eight months later, he was now knee-deep in a plan to recover the family name, to make people stagger when hearing _"Malfoy_" again. Wizards everywhere would understand their _misunderstanding_ of the Malfoy family, and the prestige that they once carried with them would be restored.


End file.
